How David Ayer Celebrated Suicide Squad’s Latest Box Office Milestone

How do you judge if a film's successful? It's becoming increasingly harder to tell. You could look at reviews. You could judge it on how moviegoers react. Or you can take reach your conclusion based on box office. Clearly David Ayer has decided to use the latter to deem Suicide Squad a success, because the blockbuster's writer and director has come and out and roundly celebrate it reaching a huge milestone.

David Ayer took to Twitter to rejoice in the fact that Suicide Squad has now passed $600 million at the worldwide box office, and he immediately thanked everyone who has been to see the film for making it such a triumph.

But where does this total leave Suicide Squad in the rankings against its comic-book rivals? Compared to its peers in the DC Extended Universe, Suicide Squadstill has $68 million to go to eclipse Man Of Steel's $668 million that it amassed back in 2013.

But considering that it's only left to be released in Japan, and it's now going into its fourth week of release domestically it's still very much up in the air whether it will do just that. That, of course, means that it won't come anywhere near to matching Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice's $872.6 million gross.

But, Suicide Squad has already moved past the likes of Ant-Man, Captain America: The First Avenger, Thor, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man, which were all origin stories for these Marvel characters, just like SS was for the likes of Deadshot, Harley Quinn, The Joker, Captain Boomerang et al. In fact, the only origin story that Suicide Squad hasn't and probably won't get past is Guardians Of The Galaxy's $773 million, which was something of a phenomenon back in 2014 as it seemed to perfectly capture the zeitgeist.

But what does all this mean? Well, at the moment, it's still a little hard to tell. While Suicide Squad's critical response would lead you to think that the DC Extended Universe is in a bit of bother, the fact that it helped to get the DCEU to $2.1 billion after just three films when Marvel took four and a bit films to reach that total suggests they're actually in good stead.

It's still too early to tell if the poor reviews will have dire repercussions for the DC Extended Universe, because audiences could decide that after Batman v Superman and Suicide Squadthey're not really interested in seeing how it expands. We'll get our answer next year, when Wonder Woman and Justice League arrive in theaters on June 2, 2017, and November 17, 2017 respectively.